One plan, one instruction a month

The one mechanism with randomised evidence behind it

Almost everything written about investor behaviour is observational, which means it can tell you what disciplined people also happened to do, but not what made them disciplined. There is one prominent exception, and this product is built on it.

Gargano and Rossi, writing in the Journal of Finance in 2024, studied a randomised rollout of a goal-tracking feature inside a real savings and investment app. Users who could see their progress against a personal goal behaved measurably better than the control group — and the effect was largest among the people who had been saving worst.

The shape of a month

1. Step 01

   The contribution arrives, and the plan is applied to it

   Your weights, your amount, your currency. The arithmetic is shown rather than asserted: this much goes here because that part of the plan is furthest below the weight you wrote. New money does the rebalancing, so nothing is sold, no tax event is created, and no judgement call is required.

2. Step 02

   You place the orders yourself

   There is no execution path in this product, for any broker, by design. A month ends at a list you take to your own account, where you can see the live quote and choose the order type.

3. Step 03

   One tap records what actually filled

   Quantities and prices are editable, and any line can be marked skipped. This step is not bookkeeping — it is the measurement the whole thesis rests on.

Then nothing, until next month. No streaks, no daily notifications, no invented reasons to open the app. Boredom is the correct state of a working plan, and a product that fights for your attention between contributions is contradicting its own advice.

Why the answer was not simply more dashboards

The intuitive move — show investors more information, more often — has surprisingly little evidence behind it, and some against.

Less price information, better decisions

The strongest causal field experiment in this area, run by Larson, List and Metcalfe on professional traders, gave one group less price information. That group took more risk and finished with substantially higher profits.

Confidence is not protection

Elkind and co-authors found in 2022 that investors who rate themselves as expert panic-sell more often, not less. Feeling equipped to interpret a fall is not the same as being able to sit through one.

The real gap is smaller than advertised

Morningstar's Mind the Gap work puts the cost of investor behaviour at roughly 1.2 percentage points a year — not the four to eight points claimed by the older DALBAR studies, whose methodology has been widely discredited.

The conclusion drawn here is not to hide the numbers. It is that a number without a verdict invites the question it cannot answer. Net worth, performance, allocation and income all stay, and each one is expected to say what it means for the plan rather than leaving you to guess.

Twelve of twelve, and what is still unproven

Success at one year is twelve contributions executed on schedule. Not a return — the return belongs to the market and was never anyone’s to promise. Adherence is the only outcome this product can honestly claim to cause, and it is the one that compounds.

The record keeps the answer honest. Every contribution confirmed, every plan change with its date and what it replaced, every drawdown held through without a change. If the loop is not working for you, that is the surface that will say so first. The worldview it all sits on is in own what no issuer controls.